Being Taught

One of the things I'm spending my time doing at the moment is learning Greek (as written around the Eastern Mediterranean in the 1st century AD). That's good fun, but in a way very odd.

Lectures aren't too bad. OK, I've not been to many in the last few years, but I very rarely gave them. But sitting in a room with 12 other pupils and a teacher, who then proceeds to teach, is very odd, because I've done that as a teacher as well.

It's odd for several reasons:

• I'm automatically picking up on the various teaching skills he uses (and sometimes wish he wouldn't always give me difficult questions)
• I'm now going away and doing homework after setting and marking so much of it, so I get more of an idea of why people sometimes don't get full marks, etc
• I'm a lot more conscious of what I'm doing and why, I understand some of the odd advice (like doing bits of Greek every day rather than just spending the morning on it) better
• seeing how I've changed as a pupil in the 10 years or so since I last had to do something like this. I'm probably less of a perfectionist, but much better at taking the long view. I'm not aiming to get 100% on every test and piece of work; I'm aiming to get fluent.
• bits of Latin grammar keep popping into my head. At least once, I've been asked to translate some English into Greek and the Latin version has just appeared...